Maybe it was during a 20-minute, 2-mile taxi ride from Georgetown to downtown D.C., where my average speed was 6 miles per hour. Or maybe it was during a lurching bus ride across K Street that took perhaps half an hour to traverse the same distance. During both trips, city street were jammed with large, single-occupancy vehicles, while buses, delivery trucks, and business vehicles were slowed to a crawl.
Washington, D.C. needs to get serious about downtown congestion. London congestion pricing has been a smashing success, with the Times reporting today on an unexpected benefit: drastically reduced parking costs downtown. Not the mention the significant revenue for public transportation investment. Now officials in Manchester are contemplating a two-ring system that would charge motorists £1-3 to enter the city, depending on the time of day and location. While business types are skeptical (as they usually are) the only evidence they can marshal are opinion polls. That takes us to Paris, a city that has cut auto use by 20 percent in seven years — without London-style congestion pricing. When parking spaces were converted to a dedicated bus route, the residents of the Left Bank neighborhood of Montparnasse held a funeral, predicting the death of the neighborhood. Now the owner of a famous cafe admits “We’ve come to love it,” noting the bus brings workers and customers with improved efficiency. Elsewhere in the city, programs initiated by mayor Bertrand Delanoë are raising the cost of parking, creating dedicated bus and bicycle lanes, making tens of thousands of bikes available for rent, and “civilizing” the city’s most car-friendly streets by cutting lanes and expanding pedestrian space.
D.C.’s attempts are meager in comparison. Increased parking meter prices are only in effect in several neighborhoods. The tiny and highly-hyped bike sharing program still hasn’t launched despite media reports it would start in May. The networking of bicycle lanes and trails is fragmented and far shorter than other U.S. cities. DDOT’s experimental bus and bicycle lane on 9th Street downtown is too short and poorly marked and enforced to make much of a difference.
The solutions to congestion are at hand, all that’s lacking is the resources and political will to do them.
San Francisco tried doing this a couple years ago, but it eventually went the wayside due to its unpopularity, but every now and then, the idea resurfaces. It is a great idea; I think the logistics of implementing it will be difficult (toll booths, etc.)
I missed up my html in my previous comment. This is the link to the SF Chronicle article that I intended to reference in the “idea resurfaces.”
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Your essay sounds more like a good argument for building some freeways, particularly the I-66 K Street Tunnel.
A helpful thing is that we have a river. Put a toll on every potomac crossing at peak times. You may say that that is biased against Virginia, but the wealthiest people in the area live in NoVa [I live by Dunn Loring, I don’t commute into the city, but I’m not just hating on Virginia].
Virginia benefits by having a silver line, and the columbia pike streetcar, and maybe another metro potomac river crossing [separate blue line]. Eventually the purple line across to Maryland, etc.
Start out at a dollar, and raise it a dollar a year for 10 years. Give everyone a chance to adjust before it becomes crushingly expensive.
Eventually we can have a comprehensive district wide system. But adding tolls to bridges probably takes several years less than a comprehensive congestion pricing system.